While in his self-imposed exile in Iran, Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim the spiritual leader of the Bahraini opposition’s Al Wefaq Islamic society has called on his followers to boycott the upcoming parliamentary and municipal elections.
Ayatollah Qassim stressed that participation in the elections is a service to injustice and is considered self-harm. The Islamic fatwa like political statement by the Ayatollah reflects the Bahraini opposition’s lack of any kind of strategy for reintegrating itself into the political process, following its repeated boycott and loss of followers.
Ayatollah Qassim will certainly have a minor group of Bahrainis who will follow his irrational calls to boycott the elections. However, what Ayatollah Qassim, Al Wefaq and some others fail to understand is that they have lost majority of their supporters while continuing to distance themselves from the political process.
While they’ve continued to campaign against their country, their young followers shifted their priorities and felt that their economic interests and the well-being of their families came before political leaders with insensible agendas.
There is a generation of Bahrainis who vote in constituencies that belonged to the opposition (Al Wefaq) in the 2006 and 2010 parliament. Their seats were successfully replaced in the 2011 byelections following Al Wefaq’s withdrawal from parliament and in following elections in 2014 and 2018 by Shia figures who came forward to serve their constituents and put their country first.
Al Wefaq were simply replaceable and were replaced by their own voters. It is expected that these constituencies will continue to do well in the upcoming elections despite Ayatollah Qassim’s calls for boycott, with the exception of a few. Al Wefaq continuously refused to join the elections while taking orders from its spiritual leaders.
A sad reality that some of its supporters have realised is that the opposition led by Al Wefaq was never democratic and never will be. An opposition that bows down to a religious leader does not have a vision for democracy. And the vision for democracy Ayatollah Qassim has possibly resembles the land he chose for his self-imposed exile, the Islamic Republic.
Bahrain is a young democracy and it is far from perfect. Citizens continuously address their grievances about the parliament’s performance, yet we do have a democratic system that we can work through. Boycotting is an irrational and unrealistic way of addressing concerns about government performance in the twenty first century.
Citizens, political societies and candidates should find ways of working within the political system rather than boycotting and sidelining themselves. A democracy is certainly not attained by boycotts, but rather by political participation.